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business to expect you to break up and come to a new
home unless I can make it an object to you in
some way. You can do some things for your
children here that you could not do in Homesworth.
I will give you two thousand dollars a year to live
on, and secure the same to you if I die.
I have a house here in Aspen Street, not far
from where I live myself, which I will give to
either of you that it may suit. That you can settle
between you when you come. It is rather a
large house, and Mrs. Ledwith’s family
is larger, I think, than yours. The estate is
worth ten thousand dollars, and I will give the
same sum to the one who prefers, to put into
a house elsewhere. I wish you to reckon
this as all you are ever to expect from me, except
the regard I am willing to believe I may come
to have for you. I shall look to hear from
you by the end of the week.

“Only four days to make my mind up in,”
she said again, when Luclarion had read the letter
through.

Luclarion folded it and gave it back.

“It won’t take God four days to think,”
she answered quietly; “and you can ask Him
in four minutes. You and I can talk afterwards.”
And Luclarion got up and went away a second time into
the kitchen.

That night, after Diana and Hazel were gone to bed,
their mother and Luclarion Grapp had some last words
about it, sitting by the white-scoured kitchen table,
where Luclarion had just done mixing bread and covered
it away for rising. Mrs. Ripwinkley was apt to
come out and talk things over at this time of the kneading.
She could get more from Luclarion then than at any
other opportunity. Perhaps that was because Miss
Grapp could not walk off from the bread-trough; or
it might be that there was some sympathy between the
mixing of her flour and yeast into a sweet and lively
perfection, and the bringing of her mental leaven wholesomely
to bear.

“It looks as if it were meant, Luclarion,”
said Mrs. Ripwinkley, at last. “And just
think what it will be for the children.”

“I guess it’s meant fast enough,”
replied Luclarion. “But as for what it
will be for the children,—­why, that’s
according to what you all make of it. And that’s
the stump.”

Luclarion Grapp was fifty-four years old; but her
views of life were precisely the same that they had
been at twenty-eight.

VI.

AND.

There is a piece of Z——­, just over
the river, that they call “And.”

It began among the school-girls; Barbara Holabird
had christened it, with the shrewdness and mischief
of fourteen years old. She said the “and-so-forths”
lived there.

It was a little supplementary neighborhood; an after-growth,
coming up with the railroad improvements, when they
got a freight station established on that side for
the East Z——­ mills. “After
Z——­, what should it be but ‘And?’”
Barbara Holabird wanted to know. The people who
lived there called it East Square; but what difference
did that make?